Baghdad Noir

by Samuel Shimon

  “Careful,” Haider said.

  “How good’s security here?”

  “So-so. They might shoot at us if they see you taking pictures. I think they’re regional police, not army, which usually means they’re worse, but sometimes it means they actually give a shit. Why? You writing a story about Baiji?”

  “They will be,” Ricks told him, putting his camera away. “Can’t you drive any faster? I want to get back to my shisha tonight.”

  “Sure, boss.”

  Traffic was light, the first few checkpoints hassle-free. The story Steve Ricks told the soldiers on the road was that he was interviewing Lieutenant General Mahdi Gharawi, and with his special pass that seemed to work.

  “You really interviewing General Gharawi?” Haider asked as they rolled through the desert.

  “You really asking me a question?” Ricks shot back.

  “No sir.”

  “You know about Gharawi?”

  “Just rumors. They say he was Republican Guard under Saddam, and the Americans put him in charge of a police division after the Collapse,” Haider recited. “He ran a torture prison for Maliki, then spent a few years in the Green Zone, I think. Now he’s in charge of Nineveh.”

  “You’re pretty informed for a jundi.”

  “Soldiers gossip about their daddies—especially now, with the fight against Daesh. People say Gharawi will lose Nineveh. His divisions are mostly paper, and the army has pulled its tanks and artillery to Anbar. If Daesh hits Mosul . . . let’s just say I’m glad we’re not staying.”

  It was then that Haider saw the checkpoint up ahead and began to slow the truck. Something felt wrong. It looked like a normal improvised checkpoint: three Humvees and a few soldiers, but . . . what was it? If only his head didn’t hurt so much.

  “Why are you slowing down this far away?” Ricks asked.

  Even the soldiers had noticed, and had begun waving him forward.

  Then it hit him: those weren’t soldiers.

  “They’re Daesh,” Haider said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “The beards. Everything else looks okay, but their beards are too long. And see the Humvees: those markings are from two different units, both from Anbar. Fuck!”

  “Okay, Haider,” Ricks said, “just be cool, all right? I got this.”

  “I don’t think these guys read the Wall Street Journal, Steve Ricks.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’re not getting paid to worry. Just be cool and drive. Slow.”

  This didn’t feel like moving into an assault. This felt like an ambush. This is bad: if they make us get out, we’re fucked, and if we try to drive through, we’re fucked. We might survive the small-arms fire, but those machine guns on the Humvees will tear this little pickup to pieces.

  Haider breathed deliberately, slowly, holding his hand light on the wheel. His pistol was in his backpack on the seat next to him—the top was unzipped, like he’d left it, but it would still take too long to draw out. Their only chance would be to blast through and hope they make it. He slowed the truck, not looking at the soldier with the thick, bushy beard waving him on.

  Then the beard was at the window, and they were caught between rifles. “ID,” the beard said.

  Haider pulled out his ID card and Ricks’s pass, but before he handed them over, the American said: “How far is it from here to Raqqa?”

  The beard’s eyes narrowed. “To get to Raqqa you have to go through Dabiq.”

  “They say that to get to Dabiq you have to go through Rome,” Ricks countered.

  “Indeed,” the beard said. “The road is long, but striving in the way of God will be rewarded.”

  “Inshallah,” said Ricks, nodding.

  Haider understood now, and began to see how things would go. He’d need to get in touch with a friend of his brother, who’d gone from the Jaish al-Mahdi to Asaib ahl al-Haq. But that shouldn’t be too hard.

  “Are you the American?” the beard asked.

  “Call me Steve.”

  “Ali will ride with you.”

  “There’s room in the back,” Ricks said.

  The beard nodded, and called for Ali. One of the other fake soldiers ran up with his AK; he was just a kid, his chin dusted with scraggly hairs. “You’ll ride with them to Dair Mar Elia,” the beard instructed. “Give them directions. Then you stay with Abu Abdulrahman, okay?”

  Ali nodded and climbed in the back. With his boyish face, they wouldn’t have any trouble with actual checkpoints, and they could say they’d picked him up hitchhiking. Haider felt a sense of relief, knowing they’d be safe now, no matter what came up—at least for a while, which helped to ease his disgust and anger.

  As the afternoon wore on, they climbed the mountains south of Mosul. Then they came over the crest and the city opened before them: a metropolis of almost two million people spread across the lush Dijla Valley, verdant with grass and trees, a sudden, almost obscene shock of green after the desert. Beyond the river stood the ancient Assyrian ruins of Nineveh, and venerated mosques jutted up all around the city: the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, the Mosque of Prophet Yunus, the Mosque of Jerjis, and the Shrine of Mashad Yahya Abul Kassem. Haider had never seen Mosul before, and he had never thought much of Moslawis—Sunnis, mainly, and northerners, practically Kurds in his mind, hillfolk compared to Baghdadis like himself—but he couldn’t deny the great beauty before him. It cleansed his heart, if only for a moment, even from the taint of what he was doing.

  Just below the crest, Ali had them pull off on a side road, then guided them along the heights past a junkyard full of wrecked cars to a rambling stone ruin—or ancient squat—some kind of battered fortress.

  “That’s the Monastery of Saint Elijah,” Ricks said to Haider. “It was founded in the sixth century AD by the Chaldean Catholic Church. It was a center for Christians in Iraq, and hundreds of people made pilgrimages there every year. Then, in 1743, the Shah of Iran laid siege to Mosul, took the monastery, and killed all the monks because they wouldn’t convert to Islam. The siege of Mosul lasted forty days, but the city held.” Ricks pointed at a giant hole in the fortress wall. “You see that? That’s from a TOW missile in 2003. There was a T-72 just there,” he noted, pointing beyond the wall, “and we were so close.”

  “You were here?” Haider asked.

  “It was crazy. There was fighting all night, and I remember watching the sun come up over the hill—”

  Suddenly, three men came out of the monastery and Ali told them to stop the truck.

  Ricks woke from his reverie and got out. “You stay here,” he told Haider, grabbing his gym bag. “Be cool.”

  Steve walked up with Ali and talked to the three men, two obviously Daesh and the third, the leader, with a much shorter beard. They didn’t shake hands, they talked for about ten minutes, and then Ricks gave them the gym bag. The leader passed it to one of his men, who unzipped it and rifled around inside. A few short words were exchanged—then the American turned and walked back to the truck. The meeting was over.

  “Okay,” Ricks said, “let’s go.”

  On the way back, Ricks turned garrulous, talking about what it was like to be in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 compared to 2007 and 2008, vague about the specifics but speaking with a heartfelt nostalgia. “It was a different time then,” he recalled. “Before Obama pulled the troops out. We were winning, you know. We were holding things together.”

  Haider nodded and agreed, sometimes asking a friendly question, nothing too probing, just keeping the conversation going. The sun sank slowly into the west as they rolled back toward the city. After a couple hours, still well north of Baiji, they pulled off at a rest stop. Ricks got out and urinated against the rear tire of the truck. Haider watched his face in the rearview mirror, talking, talking.

  “The problem was,” Ricks continued, “we could never get everybody on the same side. It was always one group against another—Sunnis and Shia, this tribe and that tribe, this militia against that one. I mean, what
can you do?”

  Haider listened for another few seconds, then swiftly stepped out of the vehicle, aimed the M9, and shot Steve Ricks in the face. The American went down instantly, and Haider walked around the truck to find him sprawled in the urine-soaked dust. Haider had hit him in the cheek, shattering the whole side of his skull. Steve Ricks’s remaining eye rolled wildly, looking up at him, his mangled mouth trying to form words.

  “Tell me, my friend,” Haider snapped, “tell me what it was like.”

  The dying man made a sick, gurgling noise. Haider reached down and took the man’s M9 off his hip, then shot him twice in the crotch with it. The dying man moaned and curled in on himself, squealing quietly. Haider searched his pockets, taking his wallet, watch, and wedding band—and a chunky, gaudy ring with a bloodred stone that read, West Point 2002, USMA, Pride in All We Do. Haider didn’t know what any of that meant, but it seemed important.

  Haider got back in the truck and headed for Baghdad. Later, he stopped and looked in the backpack, which had a cell phone, some magazines for the M9, a GPS, a notebook, a couple of Tom Petty CDs, and some pens. He kept the magazines and threw the satchel out the window.

  It was late when he got back to the market. The stalls were mostly closed, the empty aisles with their fluorescent lights haunted by the absence of crowds. Abu Lulu’ah was sitting down, smoking shisha with The Hawk and a few of his men.

  Lulu’ah watched Haider walk up to the stand. “Well, my son?”

  “We had a nice visit to Mosul, Uncle,” Haider reported. “The American had me drop him off in the Karrada. But he said he needed to talk to you tomorrow morning, in person. Just you and The Hawk.”

  Lulu’ah furrowed his brows. “What’s this about?”

  “Abu Abdulrahman,” Haider said, taking a gamble. “He said the situation has changed. Eleven o’clock, he said, at the Baghdadi Museum.”

  Lulu’ah and The Hawk looked at each other, then Abu Lulu’ah nodded and turned back to Haider. “Thank you for passing on this message, my son, and for doing this favor for me today.” He touched Haider’s chest. “Jamail, the keys.”

  Haider exchanged keys with Jamail. “Thank you for your generosity, Uncle,” he said, bowing his head.

  “You are brave, jundi,” Lulu’ah told him. “Maybe you can do me another favor sometime.”

  “I would be honored, Uncle,” Haider said, bowing his head again.

  “Go in peace,” Lulu’ah dismissed, waving him away.

  It took some effort to walk calmly and slowly down the empty market aisle. There was still much to do, and he felt he was running out of time.

  * * *

  The next afternoon, Haider sat in the Shabandar Café on Mutanabbi Street, drinking tea and nursing his aching head. It hurt as badly as ever—probably now that the pressure was off, he was letting himself feel it more, and the explosion and gunfire no doubt made it worse. But still here, now, sitting among his fellow Baghdadis, on a chatty, easy afternoon in the best café in the city, everything seemed at peace. He almost felt like he could finally relax. A few blocks away, of course, the museum was still smoldering and probably crawling with police, but for Haider, it might as well have been on the other side of the world.

  Everything had turned out better than he could have hoped. One wrong step and it would have all fallen apart. He’d never been in great danger, moment by moment, but it was like hooking a fish: the sense of reeling them in, bit by bit, nice and easy. And if the fish got away, well . . . this fish would come with his own hooks.

  Abu Lulu’ah and The Hawk had arrived at eleven on the dot. He’d paid a kid to wait for them and take them upstairs into the museum, through the wax-figure exhibits of the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians; past the wax-figure reed weavers; past the wax-figure butcher, wax-figure musicians, and even a replica of the Shabandar Café, portraying the place in the 1950s—the golden age of the republic. He’d always loved the variety of the headwear in that exhibit: the businessmen in their sidaras, the old men in their tarbooshes, the desert tribes in their ghutrahs and shemaghs, and the others in the simple taqiya. No American baseball caps . . . no Saddam fedoras . . . only Baghdadis being Baghdadis . . . enjoying themselves and each other.

  The kid led Abu Lulu’ah on, through a barrier that read, DO NOT ENTER: CONSTRUCTION. Haider had paid his cousin, who worked for the museum, to put up the sign for him. He’d told his cousin that Abu Lulu’ah had asked him to arrange a meeting there, which was true in a way. Beyond the barrier, the kid led them to the coppersmith exhibit, where wax smiths stood forging lamps, pitchers, and vases, then asked them to wait there.

  “What the fuck is this?” The Hawk had asked, but by then it was too late. Once the kid had turned down the stairs, Haider called the cell phone connected to the IED planted in the exhibit. There was a split-second when Allah might have sent a hundred thousand angels, but He didn’t—and the whole end of the hall came apart in a roar.

  Haider was up and moving as soon as the shockwave passed, stepping carefully out of the madrassa exhibit where he’d waited, kneeling in a borrowed robe and shemagh, watching the whole thing unfold. The hall smelled of cordite and blood, and through the smoke he could see that the damage was substantial. He focused not on the broken, melted, scattered wax figures around him, but on the two figures on the floor.

  Abu Lulu’ah was a pile of blood and flesh, his broad body torn to pieces by the ball bearings and shrapnel in the IED, but The Hawk was still stirring. The stringy old man was mangled but alive—he must have been standing behind Lulu’ah, protected in part by his boss’s girth. The Hawk held on to his pistol as he tried to pull himself up on a broken elbow. Haider kicked the pistol away, stepped on the old man’s elbow, and ground his heel down into the joint. The Hawk collapsed, gritting his teeth but not screaming, and stared up in fury. Haider put one bullet in each of the old man’s kneecaps, another in his stomach, and then flung the pistol into the smoke. Then he quickly turned and fled the upper hall, down the stairs, out into the street, where he bent over coughing and stumbling, putting on a show until he was around the corner in an alley—where he tore off his robe and shemagh, and walked away.

  He’d made a circuit down Rashid Street and back around to Mutanabbi, letting the adrenaline course through his body, letting the shakes come and work themselves out; then he made his way to the Shahbandar Café, where he now sat, his head killing him, drinking tea while sweat cooled on his skin. He lit a cigarette, thinking back over the past thirty-six hours, recalling the strange beauty of the Dair Mar Elia monastery overlooking Mosul, the graceful turn of the Tigris through the beautiful city, the many minarets of the many grand mosques. As the burden of the past few days began to slide from his shoulders, he embraced this powerful, expansive sense of release—almost an evacuation—a feeling so profound it brought tears to his eyes.

  He blinked, ran his hand across his face, and took another drag from his cigarette. He would eat soon, alone, in a chicken place up the street, then return to his father’s house and tell him about the truck. After that, he would lie down and watch some TV, maybe take a nap. He would need his rest. In a few days, he’d be back in the war.

  This story was originally written in English

  Baghdad House

  by Ali Bader

  al-Rashid Street

  During the summer of 1950, what happened to George Haddad, an accountant for Agha-Porter Automotive, would have been extraordinary—even for a supposedly optimistic person who expected his life to spiral downhill.

  That July, the firm’s Basra office notified George Haddad about his immediate transfer to their Baghdad office, where he would replace an accountant named Shukri Jamil for two months. Shukri had requested a leave of absence for undisclosed reasons, and abruptly vanished from the office. He was the second accountant to disappear under mysterious circumstances. Ted Lancaster, a British accountant, had also disappeared, and no trace had been found of him yet.

  George Haddad boarde
d the train for Baghdad that very evening at Basra’s al-Maqal Station. Even though the trip took all night, he had difficulty sleeping. The loud noises of the train in motion disturbed him, and a number of strange events upset him. First, he sensed that the door to his compartment had opened. Then he heard footsteps approaching. When he jerked awake, he found nothing. So he dozed off again.

  Later, he sensed that something weird was happening in the compartment and became agitated. He wasn’t sure where he was—lying in his bed at home or somewhere else. Then he remembered he was on a train. Lifting his head, he noticed an elegantly dressed stranger standing before him. The man’s face, however, looked like dough that had been left to rise for too long. George was about to greet the stranger, but the other man spoke before he could, asking for a lighter. George thrust a hand into the pocket of his jacket, which he had hung up, and pulled one out. The man lit his cigarette as he swayed in motion with the train. He looked intensely at George—straight in the eye—and returned the lighter, nodded, and left the compartment.

  * * *

  George Haddad arrived the next morning at the crowded Baghdad Central Station. Sharply dressed travelers—trailed by porters carrying their suitcases—were heading to the main exit. Vendors hawked newspapers, foreigners with brimmed hats and umbrellas waited for their trains, and university students lingered in front of the snack bar. George navigated through this frenzied crowd to the main thoroughfare. The station clock flashed 10:05, but the weather was extremely hot, and the sky was a bright blue. He immediately took off his beige jacket because of the heat, and unfurled his brown umbrella, which he used to shield himself from the wicked sun. He looked around for an inexpensive way to reach Baghdad House, whether that meant a bus or a shared taxi—the wad of bills he had in his pocket was only meant to last a week, till the firm had sorted out his salary.

  He found nothing but taxis lined up in front of a newsstand. So he climbed into the cab of an elderly driver who looked like he hadn’t shaved for days.

  After the taxi crossed Baghdad’s agricultural zone, it entered the heart of the city and headed down to al-Rashid Street—a long thoroughfare lined by modern buildings on both sides. At this late-morning hour, it was crowded with vehicles—mostly American-made—wagons drawn by horses with black tassels and drivers dressed in traditional clothing, and red double-decker Leyland buses. Since the buildings cast a shadow over the street, George opened the car window to allow the cool, humid breeze to waft in.